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Body and Self-awareness: Functional and Dysfunctional Mechanisms

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Neuropsychology of the Sense of Agency

Abstract

Some features of human experience contribute to a person’s self-consciousness as the “ability to represent one’s own bodily and mental states as one’s own states” [1]. Although some aspects of this ability are phenomenologically the same, they are heterogeneous on both the functional and the representational level. Experienced phenomena involved in self-consciousness are the sum of one’s own experiences, the perspectivity of these experiences, the sense of ownership of one’s own body parts, the sense of agency of actions, the sense of authorship of thoughts, and the trans-temporal integration of all this into autobiographical knowledge [1]. These aspects highlight the psychological, physiological, and neural mechanisms involved in bodily experience and important for self-consciousness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Michela Balconi & Adriana Bortolotti

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  1. Michela Balconi
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  2. Adriana Bortolotti
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Balconi Michela

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Balconi, M., Bortolotti, A. (2010). Body and Self-awareness: Functional and Dysfunctional Mechanisms. In: Michela, B. (eds) Neuropsychology of the Sense of Agency. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-1587-6_10

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